The present invention relates to a vehicular lamp, such as so call a high mount stop lamp (HMSL, when applicable), in which a lens surface serving as a light emitting face is designated to be small in the vertical direction. More specifically, the invention relates to a vehicular lamp in which high brightness at a light emitting face can be accomplished.
Recently, an HMSL is formed such that a lens surface serving as a light emitting face is short in height dimension. This shape is desired not only by the design viewpoint of the automobile, but also the demand that a rear visual field of the driver is not interrupted as possible when the HMSL is mounted on the rear portion of the automobile. In the HMSL, therefore, both a lamp body and a lens attached to a front opening of the lamp body are short in height dimension, and they form a lamp chamber, and a bulb serving as a light source is accommodated in the lamp chamber thus constructed.
Since the lamp body must be short in height dimension due to the reduced height of the lens, a reflector which is provided at a rear portion of the lamp body must be also designed small in height dimension. Therefore, the light intensity of a part of light, which emits from the bulb reflected by the reflector and passes through the lens and is finally available to actual illumination, must be suppressed. In other words, a solid angle for the light emitting from the light source is restricted by the reflector, and thereby the effective intensity of light is reduced. Accordingly, the amount of light which passes through the lens is lowered, and it is difficult to obtain the desired brightness at the lens.
In view of the foregoing difficulties, as shown in FIG. 11 for example, it is proposed that plural reflectors 101 and bulbs 102 are laterally arrayed for a lamp and it makes the amount of the light emitting from the bulbs increase so that the total light amount passing through a lens 103 having a reduced width can increase, that is, the brightness at the lens of the lamp can be improved. On the other hand, however, the proposed arrangement of these plural reflectors and bulbs is still disadvantageous in that the lamp size becomes larger and the lamp consumes more electric power.